Him:Self :: Cause:Effect
by MuchaLuchaAndMe
Summary: There was a point where there was sincerity in his smile. That point was not now.
1. Self

To take a fall and to crash deep into the core was not a failure to him, the boy with a golden cover on his hands, the boy with teeth that spoke every word without using sound. To land on both feet and to stand tall and proud was neither a success to him, the child with body made of leather, the child with a skull made of steel. To take a step and to live the next day was the only success and the only failure; to stand on top and look at the bottom, to see the face of your own mortality waiting patiently for a predetermined date, to know that reason had long since left for another mind was the true victory to him.

And the true defeat, his lack of bravery.

To see Death and to not even flinch was not the strength of man, but the weakness of a fool. To spit in the eye of Satan and insult the dignity of God as so you may live to be a being that transcends both heaven and hell in a single moment was not a miracle, but a misguided faith. To see the laws of the world and to take a pen with ink permanent, and replace it so it is what you make of it, does not make you more than man- it makes you less than the dirt children play on.

To live until it hurts is not to be brave, it is hiding from the truth.

The truth that most every day of his life was a constant stab in his heart, ripping the veins and draining all color, leaving his body cold and still, dripping in the taste of his own blood. The truth that he was the one ripping and tearing at the scabs, the hole growing deeper and the pain growing number.

Self inflicted pain.

It was no lie, he knew very well that was how is life was lived.

To live until it hurt, to take that pain and relish in it. To experience the feeling of it all as if it was more familiar then the taste of cider that was hot and smooth, burning the flesh in a way that tickled more than stung; more familiar then the taste of freshly fallen snow, and the sound it would make as you walk by.

His frustrations were let out in a way not even a man with the most broken of hearts could understand. When they would try, he only made them hate him.

No.

_They_ only made him hate them. They made him hate the way they talked, the way they dressed, the way they put their lemon hair up as if it even mattered.

They made him hate self. The him, he adored, with every part of his soul, with every beat of his heart, but the self was an anathema. A pulsing tumor he wanted to tear out every day, with every movement he made, with every breath he drew to say another thing to appease his own self, his own loathing. Himself was nothing more than a bitter pool of apathy.

But he did not hate himself.

He knew to the fullest extent of what those words meant, and even without a thought, even without knowing, he knew. And that was how he would get out of bed and that was how he would smile, and that was how he would climb up the hill every day and that was how he would get down each night. He knew it, he knew it was all okay. He knew it hurt but he knew why and he knew how and he knew how to alleviate it.

And yet he did not, he did not ease at all. He did not look at the cause and he did not tell it every word that was pounding in his head, he did not take its hand and hold it to his chest, letting it know that every beat was crying out its name. He did not wake up every dawn and smile at himself, knowing that he was okay with this, okay with the fact it flowed through his veins, that it was more a part of him then his self even was. Because there was a point where every smile his self had was a genuine one, that every breath had a purpose, that there was a desire and a goal his self could touch, that his dreams were obtainable. But that point hadn't brought the cause to light, it had held it somewhere dark, somewhere he could not even taste on the breath of the wind.

And to him it was ridiculous, to think that hair so perfectly long, so colored like the sun, would ever be covered with anything so red; to think that a shirt could fit a body so perfectly, yet not at all, that eyes could be so bright, bursting with the energy the world would feed off of. To think that, out of all the people, they could be the only one who spoke reason so clear, so to the point, yet support in everything he did; everything his self did. To think such things could be such a tragedy.

To think that, out of every creature on the world, out of every life that had ever live, out of every object ever built…

It had been his best friend to make him hate his self.


	2. Vomit

I felt… weird.

A strange rumbling at my belly, aching deep in my heart like a bad case of food poisoning. I could feel the sting of words trembling in my chest but I had no desire to release the inner workings of my mind through my throat in a sickly vomit.

Still, there I sat, head hanging over the rim of a toilet, edges once white tainted with dust and tiny hairs, bowl floating green and yellow as though it had always been that way, and not the foul inner workings of a broken child. Hands wanted so bad to let go of whatever they clung to, to stroke the raging torment of my stomach to a silent murmur, but there was no comfort to be had as the stress became rushed and hard and once more, my body rejecting my thoughts in a gaseous liquid spilling sloppy from my lips, burning every inch of my throat with the taste of every word of hate I had ever spoke in my pathos life.

Comfort had a way of finding me, even without a want.

A gentle hand, pressed soft against my back. A gentle word, spoke soft against my heart, "Kick, are you okay?" It whispered words of worry that clashed with the words of desperation burning tight to my soul. I opened my mouth, so many ideas of a sentence bouncing like a child would on Christmas, but it only came out as a half regurgitated piece of steak. Though his expression was left to my tainted imagination, the depth of his words was thick enough to paint an image of absolute pity.

His hand began to stroke my back. Smooth, soft, with a love to its touch I wanted to badly to grab hold of with my own hands. To make it stay and be a solid flame burning white in my arms, like a child would cling to their mother. I must have looked like I had lost all spine.

Why had he bothered searching for it?

More whispers, floating with the sweetness of honey, volume strong with compassion as if I could hear if not spoken in that exact way. I would not have been able, I concluded, as he must have also found out years ago- the hours of men smaller than me. I could have written a list of these things, things I could have never known of myself but he had resolved many months before. But I knew not of what he did.

I knew not of myself.

"It's alright," He spoke, his body growing close and words growing hot, "It's all okay."

Those same ideas of hate cooked in my soul.

His arms wrapped my waist with a friends embrace.

Hate, hate, _hate._

Hate was all the dripped from my eyes, as I clung to his body, warm and pale, words of everything pouring wet and thick from me, like tears, because they _were _tears.

I wanted to vomit.

But there was nothing left to say.

I skipped school the next morning.


	3. Had

You have this all under control.

You could make it.

You are alright.

You aren't crying. You aren't doing anything. You are thinking. That's all. You are sitting on your bed, watching your best friend sleep next to you, telling yourself over and over this is how it has always been.

It's cold tonight. That's why you decide to wear pajama's. He is your bestfriend. He doesn't care that you aren't breathing that same purr into the air.

He wasn't awake.

He couldn't see you watching him breath.

He couldn't know how his smiling mouth made you boil with rage.

You are cool.

He knew you are cool.

You knew you were cool.

You had it under control.

All of it was under control.

You had this.

(Yet you still don't have him)


	4. Hurt

A single footstep was all it took to set the stage for a single lifetime.

He stood there, with a mouth hung where air scooped in and fell out with the same grace as an empty cave. His fingers dug sharp and deep around the straps off his backpack and into the white skin of his body, as his eyes studied what he wanted to believe was his classroom with the same elegance as a home inspector. With a subtle swiftness that only a man that really cared far beyond what was healthy could see, he slammed his mouth closed with a lock and key, biting hard against his tongue as he stumbled to the pale darkness of a tight scowled teacher, their eyes not meeting once as her fingers traced with the speed of a elephant at white pages of words.

"Mr. Buttowski." She drawled, a single glance given to him as a courtesy he felt a sudden regret for ever wanting.

"I forgot today's presentation." The child rasped, feeling the still rumble of his voice against his swelled throat. She coughed, or laughed, or made some kind of guttural noise that made his body recoil in a kind of disgust that his own self-conscious was familiar with, if not_ too_ familiar.

"Mmm-hmm." She made few small strokes of a pen on a pad sitting by her left hand, leaving him standing in silence as he built up a resistance to looking as if he cared, all while he tried his hardest to make his eyes escape his own head so that he could see a glimpse of the words she wrote. She gave him another look, and her eyes fell tired, "Well don't just stand there—sit."

"But—"

"_Sit._" It wasn't commanding in even the slightest, but it triggered a kind of obedience that had once been so far gone, not even he could reach out and grab it. And there was a shame in his step as he sauntered away, to his lone desk, in the back where his dead eyes were never seen even as you searched for them. He felt a smile on his back and he looked at the only face that seemed to shed some kind of support, in a sea of silent laughter and loud affronts.

He gave a smile in return, but it wasn't a smile. It was the kind that you gave to your family after the world had just beaten you senseless, after everything wrong had hit you like a bullet train; the type of smile that you gave so that you might relish in the joy of seeing someone think everything had been alright, and the joy of never having to speak and relive those times of pain. But it was still a sad kind of happiness he got when there was a kind word sent his way, and a familiar face being the deliverer.

But a fire kicked in his gut, surrounding his heart in a sickening smog. He coughed balls of cotton into his hand, sitting in his chair with eyes intent on the body as it lost interest and began to focus on the sounds of the one woman who ruled their lives with a system forced upon each and every one of them. But that same burning dug deep into his spine as he sat there, not hearing anything, not a word or a voice be it kind or cruel.

And after an hour in silence, all he could hear was buzzing. Soft, poisonous—growing at a rate he couldn't control. Growing like the buzzing of an alarm, proportionate to how hard you tried to ignore it. His hands cradled his head, trying so hard to get rid of that noise but it was _inside _of him, and no matter how he clenched the sound built louder and louder, scraping at the edges of his brain, stabbing paralysis into his spine as he dug tighter and tighter, feeling the skin of his scalp bending and twisting to the will of his nails, sharps and cutting.

_Clarence_

He could feel a vibration in his chest as he dug in deeper into his desk, the screeching wails ringing all about him, sending a feeling he just was not familiar with deep inside his chest with the force of a jet, breaking the blood vessels deep inside his heart. He wanted to grasp at it with a stabbing desperation but he feared if he left his ears unguarded, the buzz would overwhelm him and he would succumb to the darkness he had already dug himself six feet under.

_Clarence Buttowski, are you listening?_

His teeth were biting at his lip as the pain became something beyond unbearable, to a pure and simple sensation of _hurt._

"_Clarence!_" The room flooded with color within that instant, his hands slamming to his desk as a tidal wave of air slammed down his throat. There was nothing to behold. The soft tapping of a shoe was not the same scream he lost as he stared with still eyes to a very tall figure.

She bore a frown of disapproval. Of disappointment, as if there was some part of him to love, to think something about him was needed enough to hate. She held lost expectation in him, and there was that calm period of withdraw. Her hair was so similar, so familiar, so golden and long in length that he felt his skin grow warm. She had a name. For the life of him, he could not think of it.

"Clarence, is there something you'd like to say about my presentation?" It tasted like a clockwork routine that was a stale sludge caked on the roof of his mouth, and the bottom of his tongue.

"Not at all," He spoke, interlacing his fingers with one another, forlorn in his heart as he dreaded the response he could not control, "Your calculator is _very _interesting." He watched that same expectation she grasped so tight in her eyes burn up in an inferno of rage, finger raising high as she half opened her mouth, half took a step towards him.

"_Kendall,_" A harsh voice cut the air, the name sparking a realization in his heart. He finally understood why she had looked so much like a person he knew, why she had eyes that looked upon him with such disappointment, with such disdain. All eyes that had once fallen on him, were now looking with a kind of subtle terror that only fear of retribution would bring. But Kendall, the girl with expectation, _Kendall _had an entirely different brand of fear. The kind of fear that was not natural for any situation. He watched the teachers face once disfigured with frustration melt into a complacent frown as all students had their eyes on her, "That's quite enough. And Mr. Buttowski,"

He sat up straight in his chair, back aligning with a tinge of stress, yet he still was smiling and she didn't seem less then faltered by it though the rate of his heart had picked up by half a pound, "I trust we won't be having anymore outbursts from you."

"Of course." He wasn't sure if it was a lie. He could taste the sarcasm in his throat, lingering on even as he sat with a cool demeanor in a hard chair, but he did mean it. He wasn't sure if it was a lie.

Kendall, with a look of both triumph and frustration, stepped back and slipped into her speech with the fluidity of a garden hose, eyes dashing back every so often to him. He closed his mind as the sounds of ringing began to wash over again, trying to ignore the _hurt_ inside his chest.


	5. Guilt

He hadn't expected for it to go down quite so viciously. Some part of him always expected that the physical pain was about as bad as it could be, as bad as it ever got. Because it wasn't as if blood did not stop falling from his skin, and it wasn't as if a torn limb- with proper time- couldn't tie back together and settle back into place. Physical hurt was such a simple, expected thing that to his body now it hadn't even hurt. It was a cost. Another risk. It was part of how the world worked, another sense that kept his breath slipping into his lunges, and coughing back out with a dirty jerk.

But he always _forgot_ the emotional fact that the heart was always pounding, and if it were cut, nothing could stop the sting. Dull, subtle, under the skin, yet untouchable. The best he could do was to try and forget it was there. Yet a wrong did not wrong a right- but even still he needed some way to forget this pain. This terror, so _fragile _in his hands was_ not_ the same addiction he drank with such a hungry tongue, fingers digging deeper into the crust of his being just so he might get one last drop for the breath of his life. For nothing about this terror was right.

It was all wrong. He was all wrong. They were all wrong.

He took in the image, his heart pounding as he clasped it tight in the ten thin bits he had used with cowardice to keep his lies marching forth, "You can do this," He cut into the air, voice dripping out with a sickening confidence, manufactured by his own crying soul, the wound in his chest cutting farther down to his heart and ripping flesh from the bone, twisting with a cruel slowness, tearing from his being with a sickening frown, the putrid stench of his truest thoughts filling the room "For Gunther." He wrung around in his single sheets, head lying down in an orange and soft pillow, his dreams screaming from within the fabricated surface as his lone body hugged the picture to his heart with warmth and cold, trying in a subconscious effort to stop the endless bleeding.

Trying _so hard_ to erase this _guilt._


End file.
